Diodon now with a zeitgeist

Diodon version 0.9.0 has been released today which is basically a maintenance release so it runs smoothly on Ubuntu 12.10. However, behind the scenes a few more things have changed.

For instance is there now a unit testing framework in place which I wrote about in a previous post.

What I want to introduce you in this post though is a start into a new Diodon era using Zeitgeist. You might ask yourself: What is Zeitgeist?

That’s a good question and I think best answered by the Zeitgeist folks themselves. So here is a quote from there website:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

As Diodon is basically keeping a history of the last users’ copy events it makes perfect sense to store those events in Zeitgeist. Therefore is there now a Zeitgeist plugin (a so called Data Source) available for Diodon. You simply have to install the package diodon-plugins and enable the plugin by going to Preferences -> Plugins.

What this plugin for now basically does is storing a description of what has been copied at a certain time plus the path to the original application content has been copied from. It also points to a clipboard id. However as items currently get deleted when a certain history size has been reached, this id can not be used to execute a copy/paste event again. There are some ideas though for the future that it might be possible to replace the current xml based storage with Zeitgeist completely. This is however only an idea so far. This Diodon Zeitgeist Plugin therefore is a playground to really see what Zeitgeist is capable of and how well it works with a clipboard manager. So if you have any feedback where we can go further from here, please let me know.

Will keep you updated about more exciting news when it comes to Diodon.

2 thoughts on “Diodon now with a zeitgeist

  1. Hi,

    For me Diodon Clipboard Manager is the best in linux world 😀

    I have a question:
    Is it possible to show history (after pressing history key) under “text cursor”.
    Currently history appears under “mouse cursor”, which may be little frustrating.

    Best regards,
    Lukasz

    1. Thanks for your feedback.

      This seems an interesting idea. I am afraid though that it is not possible to figure out where the text cursor currently is. This is due to several obstacles. One thing is that there might be no text cursor. The other thing though is that each toolkit is handling the text cursor itself. X11 just knows which application is active and then will send the key pressed to this application. This application (or toolkit) then knows where to insert it.

      But I will certainly due some research on this to see whether there might be a possibility which I currently do not see.

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